Short Films: Orly Yadin's and Sylvie Bringas' "Silence"

Silence is an 11-minute animated documentary film about a little girl holocaust survivor and her learned and self-imposed silences.

In conjunction with the film, Yadin presented a fascinating paper at The Holocaust and the Moving Image held at the Imperial War Museum in July 2003. She writes about the experience of making the film:

Whilst I was interested in Tana’s story for personal reasons, I could not imagine, initially, how to produce a film that would shed new light on survivors’ experiences and how to reach out to a new audience. Apart from a couple of photographs and three letters, Tana had no visual documentation of her childhood. Apart from the Nazi propaganda film made of Theresienstadt, there was no footage that I knew of that could help illuminate her story. I was not interested in filming yet another interview with a survivor talking about events she experienced at a much younger age. So, I kept on saying no to the idea of making a film. Tana, however, was persistent. She was determined to end her silence, but didn’t want to face an audience herself.

Comments

[article about moviesplanet]

I think that it is extremely important to illuminate the past in a new light - and keep on illuminating the present by that past :) Great work- I enjoyed watching it very much.

[Cathy]

Thanks for posting this, Erin. If you know of anymore links to animated documentaries, send them my way--to show my students.